Brief Mental Skills Training Improves Memory and Performance in High Stress Police Cadet Training

Abstract

Psychological performance training has been shown to mitigate the negative effects of stress for police officers. We contributed to this body of evidence using techniques in breathing, mental performance imagery, and attentional focus. One group (experimental) of police academy cadets was trained in these techniques to deal with the stressful event of being sprayed with oleoresin capsicum (OC). Their physiological and behavioral responses to the event were compared to a control group of cadets. The results showed the experimental group demonstrated significantly better memory recall of salient aspects of the OC spray event and that cadets from both groups using controlled breathing during the event scored significantly higher in memory recall. Several trends were found that further suggested the effectiveness of psychological performance training. While heart rate increased from baseline to pre-OC and post-OC measures across groups, there were no group differences at these time points. Our findings add to the growing body of literature on psychological skill training effects on tactical performance and are notable for results of enhanced performance occurring with relatively brief training in the psychological techniques.Because of the ecological design, the findings should generalize to other high stress encounters in policing.

Cognitive Fitness Framework: Towards Assessing, Training and Augmenting Individual-Difference Factors Underpinning High-Performance Cognition

“…More specifically, the occupational performance literature has accumulated promising evidence of the cognitive attributes that are considered both trainable and capable of producing reliable performance gains for the end-user-be it an athlete (Morris and Summers, 2004;Fadde and Zaichkowsky, 2018), police officer (Page et al, 2016), first-responder (Joyce et al, 2019), or a warfighter (Adler et al, 2015;Cooper and Fry, 2018;Blacker et al, 2019).…”

Profiles of U.S. Law Enforcement Officers’ Physical, Psychological, and Behavioral Health: Results From a Nationally Representative Survey of Officers

“…Although reviews of intervention studies—targeting stress and behavioral risk factors for poor health outcomes—found multiple weaknesses in design and limited impact (Lees et al., 2019; MacMillan et al., 2017; Patterson et al., 2012; Rachele et al., 2014; Wolkow et al., 2013), the level of attention to developing working models for integration into law enforcement agencies is promising. For example, psychological skill training may have an impact on officers’ memory (Page et al., 2016), and research assessing the impact of workplace resilience training also points to moderate effectiveness (Leppin et al., 2014; Vanhove et al., 2016) across sectors and for police performance (e.g., Andersen & Gustafsberg, 2016). The current study adds to the field of prevention in terms of identifying psychological, physical, and behavioral comorbidities requiring attention.…”

Complex Motor Learning and Police Training: Applied, Cognitive, and Clinical Perspectives

“…Another investigation on the efficacy of two 75-min breathing, imagery, and attentional control training sessions found improved memory for details during a stressful OC training drill compared to controls. However, training did not improve autonomic stress responses, and the authors did not report post-training performance results (Page et al, 2016). While these findings suggest a modest added benefit of mental skills training to motor learning paradigms, direct comparison of different learning strategies have shown that combined physical and mental practice is not as effective in training procedural skills compared to 100% physical practice (Hird et al, 1991).…”